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Feb 23 (Reuters) - The moon lander dubbed Odysseus is "alive and well" but resting on its side a day after its white-knuckle touchdown as the first private spacecraft ever to reach the lunar surface, and the first from the U.S. since 1972, the company behind the vehicle said on Friday. The vehicle is believed to have caught one of its six landing feet on the lunar surface near the end of its final descent and tipped over, coming to rest sideways, propped up on a rock, an analysis of data by flight engineers showed, according to Houston-based Intuitive Machines...

In short: * A US moon lander has entered a circular orbit 92 kilometres above the lunar surface. * It is carrying a suite of science instruments and technology demonstrations for NASA. * What's next? The spacecraft, dubbed Odysseus, will attempt to land on the Moon on Friday. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A moon lander built by US company Intuitive Machines has reached lunar orbit, heading for an attempt at the first US touchdown on Earth's nearest celestial neighbour in more than 50 years, and the first ever by a private spacecraft. The six-legged robot lander, dubbed Odysseus, entered a circular orbit 92...

A towering new rocket has taken flight, carrying what could be the first commercial lander to touch down on the moon — and the first lunar landing mission to launch from the United States since 1972. The Vulcan Centaur rocket, a never-before-flown model developed by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, roared to life at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2:18 a.m. ET Monday. The launch vehicle soared through space for nearly an hour, expending its fuel as it ripped away from Earth’s gravity and sent the lunar lander, called Peregrine, on...

…….But in the words of a cynical internet meme: Pics, or it didn't happen. And, as Apollo moon-landing deniers have taught us, even pictures sometimes aren't enough to convince folks inclined to believe conspiracy theories. So the Indian Space Research Organization — NASA's counterpart — obliged skeptics, sharing a photo of its Chandrayaan-3 lander on the ground, with one leg visibly sticking out. Not since Angelina Jolie presented at the Oscars in 2012 has a leg had such an illustrious moment. "And here at last is ISRO issuing an official post-landing image from the Chandrayaan-3 lander, which is the final...

Chandrayaan-3, the latest iteration of India’s ambitious mission to the moon, has successfully landed on the lunar surface — making history after its predecessor failed in 2019. The landing, which took place at the targeted time of 5:34am PT (6:04pm IST) on Wednesday over a month after the spacecraft’s launch, has made India the fourth nation globally to make a soft landing on the moon, after the former Soviet Union, the U.S. and China, and the first country to land on the lunar south pole, which remains an unexplored area that is anticipated to aid in the understanding of the...

This is live coverage, in English, of the Indian moon landing scheduled within the hour. If successful it will be the first touchdown on the Lunar South Pole.

Since the launch of the Chandrayaan-3 mission on July 14, the ground stations of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) have been supporting Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to monitor the spacecraft’s health. “Since the launch of Chandrayaan-3, ESA has been supporting the mission by utilising two of the ground stations in the ESTRACK network to track the satellite in its orbit, receive telemetry from the spacecraft and forward it to the Mission Operations Centre in Bengaluru, and forward commands sent from Bengaluru to the flying satellite,” Ramesh Chellathurai, ground operations engineer at...

The first Russian spacecraft meant to land on the moon in nearly 50 years failed to enter its pre-landing orbit of the moon Saturday, according to Roscosmos, the Russian state space corporation. In a statement, the corporation said that an “abnormal situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the manoeuvre to be performed with the specified parameters.” The spacecraft, Luna-25, was expected to land on the moon on Monday, and it is unclear now whether it will stick to that schedule. Roscosmos said the team was investigating the situation but did not give further details. It...

SpaceX and Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk said recently that the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon-landing mission was an “anomalous situation.” What Happened: “The fact that we were able to go to the Moon in '69 was such an anomalous situation, it was like reaching into the future and bringing the technology forward,” said Musk on the "Full Send" podcast. The landings, which saw Neil Armstrong become the first human to step on the lunar surface, were “not the natural pace of technology development,” according to the SpaceX founder. “It’s just that the United States just collectively decided that this...

Left: mosaic of the incidence-angle-corrected SAR swaths within the ROI. Right: geomorphological map of the ROI. Credit: The Planetary Science Journal (2022). DOI: 10.3847/PSJ/ac8428 When NASA's 990-pound Dragonfly rotorcraft reaches the Selk crater region—the mission's target touchdown spot—on Saturn's moon Titan in 2034, Cornell's Léa Bonnefoy will have helped to make it a smooth landing. Bonnefoy and her colleagues assisted the future arrival by characterizing the equatorial, hummocky, knoll-like landscape by combining and analyzing all of the radar images of the area acquired by the Cassini spacecraft during its historic 13 year exploration of the Saturn system. They used radar...

The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York, has a new exhibition that will put your skills to the test, according to Gothamist’s Jennifer Vanasco. “Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen” looks at the technology of deepfakes—deceptive videos created using artificial intelligence and machine learning—and how they’re used to manipulate viewers, reports Eileen Kinsella for ArtNet News. The centerpiece of the exhibition is the video In Event of Moon Disaster, a six-minute film produced by the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality, which won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Interactive Media: Documentary this year, according to ArtDaily. Set in a...

July 1969. It's a little over eight years since the flights of Gagarin and Shepard, followed quickly by President Kennedy's challenge to put a man on the moon before the decade is out.It is only seven months since NASA's made a bold decision to send Apollo 8 all the way to the moon on the first manned flight of the massive Saturn V rocket.Now, on the morning of July 16, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins sit atop another Saturn V at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The three-stage 363-foot rocket will use...

As a tribute to the 50th anniversary of its fake moon landing, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has announced a reboot of the staged event that fooled billions worldwide, only this time featuring an all-female crew. NASA officials confirm they will release a shot-for-shot remake of the meticulously concocted phony moon landing, originally filmed at an undisclosed soundstage 50 years ago this week. The rejuvenated hoax will follow in the footsteps of other recent all-female reboots like Ghostbusters and Ocean’s 8. “Those were some great buddy films,” a NASA spokesperson told reporters, “but we made the ultimate buddy movie...

A landing attempt for the first time on Moon's south pole. Previous landings (US, Russia, China) have all been near the equator. Live streaming will start 2:40 pm EST (1:10 AM India time)

This past weekend the country celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. It was, for those too young to recall, the first time any nation put humans on an alien world. It was an amazing feat of engineering, ingenuity, and courage. And it happened just eight years and 56 days after President John F. Kennedy had issued a challenge to the nation to do it. From a presidential speech to footprints on the moon in eight years and a couple months! That same president also had a plan to “reform” K-12 public education, as has every single...

Pope Francis is hoping that the 50th anniversary of the first moon walk inspires efforts to help our “common home” on Earth. […] He expressed hope that the memory of “that great step for humanity” would spark the desire for progress on other fronts: “more dignity for the weak, more justice among people, more future for our common home.” …

Our nation yesterday rightly treated itself to a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing. Vice President Pence summed it up this way: "This may be the only event of the 20th century that will be remembered in the 30th. But it wasn’t celebrated by everybody. Even for an event like this, there are conspiracy theorists. They claim that the Apollo program never happened, that it was all faked by the United States government, as in the movie Capricorn-1. Examples: Some conspiracy theorists talk about the fluttering in the flag planted by Buzz Aldrin. (Explanation: it was vibrations in the wires...

Normally, I try to steer clear of putting opinion pieces into the first person, but the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing is enormously personal for me.  I was the kid in 5th Grade who dressed as Neil Armstrong in order to give a presentation of my report on Armstrong as one of the great “explorers” in world history.And I find it interesting that like the trashing of the legacy of those other great explorers by today’s progressives, the singular event of man’s achievement of landing on the moon is not spared the smearing of the world’s left....

The capsule used by Neil Armstrong is deteriorating and in danger of crumbling into dust. The capsule or gondola used by Armstrong from the time he was a test pilot, X-15 pilot, and finally Gemini and Apollo astronaut is in sad condition. He not only trained in the gondola for the various space programs, but worked to develop flight controls with the engineers and technicians of the Naval Air Development Center (NADC) in Johnsvile, PA. He also used his experience there to become a NASA expert in flight simulation, one of his primary roles in the US space program. The...

With ‘Woke’ Identity Politics Is there anything they won’t spoil? s there literally anything left that they won’t try to ruin by injecting ‘woke’ identity politics into it? The 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong becoming the first man to set foot on the Moon is this weekend. Instead of using the celebration of the Apollo Moon landing to bring Americans together in a time of intense partisan bickering, the New York Times and the Washington Post are exploiting it to divide Americans even further. “The Apollo program was designed by men, for men. If we do not acknowledge the gender...